keep in mind from what the videos show to come up with some info you have to have apps like yelp installed. so you have the siri stuff doing its thing while bringing up the other app to do its thing. I am betting it is using the dual core more of apple being lazy then anything else.

ON my iPhone 4 i cannot listen to music on the iPod app while downloading songs from iTunes app . (the music stops every time a song finishes downloading and goes to processing. I am thinking that sure requires probably more cpu time and apple rather just sperate the siri and 3rd party apps on their own cores then actually making it to run on the 4.

Like i said I think its more of a lazy developer thing .

With playing music and downloading songs it quits because you are writing to the music storage area. That doesn't have anything to do with the A4, or the A5. It's been this way since the very first iOS device. I have a jailbroken iPhone that allows me to use the phone while it's syncing to iTunes and I can't view pictures while putting photo albums onto it. The app won't open or it says "rebuilding library, please wait." It force closes the photos/iPod apps until it's done syncing and even then you have to restart the photos\\iPos apps after it's done. That's true of any Apple app that syncs data to the phone. The photos/iPod apps do this every time you sync content to it, the icon is greyed out when you disconnect and open the multitasking drawer. That's a read/write issue and all computers do this to some extent. You can't write firmware or other critical software updates in OS X while it's running either, you have to restart and it updates it then. That's also why a non-jailbroken iPhone locks the screen while syncing. All of that behavior prevents the user from terminating the process mid-write and corrupting the data, not Apple being lazy.

I think Siri is amazing, especially if it works as smooth as the demo, but touting this as helping the blind, on a touchscreen device, is a bit much don't you think? For drivers it will help immensely since more and more states are making it illegal to physically hold your phone while driving. Helping the blind? A bit of a stretch.

Interesting how the trolls never learn. The same arguments every time Apple release new iProduct and specially iPhone. Every year we hear "didn't live to the hype", "greedy Apple limiting x feature to new iPhone", "only fanboys will upgrade".. etc.

I have news for you. Saying these things will not make them come true. Maybe in your mind they are true but reality is something else.

This may have more to do about the scope of Siri context for searches services. A design assumption may have been made that the search context assumes you are always connected. This way, Siri does not need to burden itself with carefully limiting its search service scope to only local resources in case the device is offline.

It works over wifi and 3G, there's always a connection. Unless you are on AT&T of course. There's nothing mentioned that 3G restricts it's ability to function because 3G is connected to the internet and through clever tunneling it could easily connect quickly to Apple servers. I just don't think they'd build servers to make an app work if they weren't going to keep them. Even in a short term. He also said it's in beta specifically so they can test and add new languages, not because they could offload the work onto the phone itself. But that doesn't mean they won't of course. If Apple is going to invest in server support for this feature that tells me it's required. Apple doesn't spend money frivolously.

sorry, but I disagree. AI is key technology in Siri.. Translation is not in Siri's domain.

Siri figures out your true intention from random text that gets passed to it by some external STT translation engine like Nuance or Apple STT legacy Mac OS engine.. Its not about matching against pre-determined phrases.

for your reference below:. Differentiation and complementation between TTS and SST translation (Nuance licensing) and AI interpretation of textual input (Siri) in iOS5.

to my ear in today's demo it didnt sounds like Nuance engine was in there, it seem more similar to the TTS technology that has been on Mac OS for a very long time. Maybe it will be licensed in time for Siri 1.0.

"Building for the future?! They should be running around reacting to the present!" -John Moltz

That's true, I only meant completly blind because the lady in the video had to search for her phone by touch. I just didn't see this as being targeted towards the completely blind because it's main form of interaction is on sight. I can see just fine and I only use the home button to figure out which end of the phone is up. I don't mean to come across as this isn't useful for the vision impared among us, just that I didn't see the iPhone as a device that fits their needs very well. Siri changes that to a big degree but I don't think this is a massive pull for blind/almost blind people. Then again, I have no experience being vision impaired, other than what I need contacts for, so I'm probably way off base.

One thing I wished they would do for me, because I work around loud aircraft as my profession, I'd like a louder phone because I can't hear this phone that well (even wearing double hearing protection). The phone is simply not loud enough for my taste. The speaker size is dictated by the formfactor, I just wish they'd manufacture louder speakers. I have about average hearing, but my phone is always at max volume. I can't hear the text message sounds when the thing is in my pocket very well. Even in a room that has conversational background level noise, showing a youtube video to someone is a pain because the speakers just don't have the power. Other phones I've seen have an abundance of sound output but mine is always at maximum to be adequate. It would be nice to have the iPhone as a much louder phone but formfactor size would suffer and I'm not sure if that would be a worthy tradeoff.

This afternoon I read the updates on the intro as they were announced. I wasn't sure what I thought. I finished my work and read that some of the so-called "experts" where "underwhelmed". I went to the Apple site and had a look for myself at the presentation first hand. At the end I was wondering what these people wanted? It is by far the most impressive phone I have seen so far and I have seen most of them. This phone is going to rock. And with the other stuff coming this month it is good to have Apple products. Here we have the most successful smartphone in the iPhone 4 and Apple takes care of the antenna problems, gives it much more power, adds great graphs, a great new camera for both still and video, and adds SIRI, which no one else has and this is underwhelming? Add to this allowing it to use the cloud and all of its features included there and people are "underwhelmed". I wonder if people take a look at the entire system when they look at this. Looks to me that the "experts" did not. I am very happy with what I saw and look forward to having one.

Apple should let people chose what their personal assistant looks like and how they speak.

Let's say that I don't like the voice in the demo, and I'd rather have a 19 year old redhead with an English accent to be my personal assistant. I should be able to input those preferences and the voice and tone will adjust accordingly to suit my needs.

Let's say that I want a hot looking African American chick, who is 25 year olds as an assistant the next day. Again, I should be able to input that data, and the voice should adapt to that, changing in accent, timbre and tone.

What if some chick wants a male assistant?

It's still in Beta, so in the future, I expect to see these options included.

Wow! You're outdoing all of your previous posts! ...and I thought your posts about women making phones while nude was bad!

Tell me, do you want your phone to talk dirty to you in that '19 year old red head' voice? I'm guessing you don't do well with girls. You're as bad as my little brother that has Lara Croft walking around naked on his computer! If you're the same age then some of your previous posts make more sense.

Interesting how the trolls never learn. The same arguments every time Apple release new iProduct and specially iPhone. Every year we hear "didn't live to the hype", "greedy Apple limiting x feature to new iPhone", "only fanboys will upgrade".. etc.

I have news for you. Saying these things will not make them come true. Maybe in your mind they are true but reality is something else.

Yep. And Apple will sell millions of them. I could probably sell quite a few tin foil hats here as well, judging by the same old conspiracy theories every year.

sorry, but I disagree. This is the key point of Siri.. not translation. If you think Siri is about TTS and STT you missed the whole reason for Siri.

Siri figures out your true intention by random text that gets passed to it. Its not about matching against pre-determined phrases. The TTS and STT part may even be licensed from Nuance. That is not the IP of interest here.

It is translation. It has to know the sentence structure of French and German to decipher what you've told it. This is pretty similar to the IBM thing they had on Jeopardy. It hears the words and their places in the sentence and then decides what you've said. It compares words to the ones before and after to it confirm what it heard and what you've meant. I'm not saying it's sole function is rigid command response but there is some of that in there. "Weather", "today", "forecast", "rain", "umbrella", "NASDAQ", "meeting", "tomorrow" "(contact name)", "(time)" are all forms of commands that it can separate, or combine, and decide context. If you can figure out what context they are in then that is a form of STT, but much more seamless and intuitive. You and I do this every day. We separate words and phrases into chunks and decide context. If I tell you I'm meeting Sally on Saturday for coffee at 9 AM, you pick out the meat of that sentence. Sally is the person, Saturday is the day, coffee is the event and 9 AM is the time I'm meeting her. This works too with words spelled incorrectly. You can decipher the word needing only the letters and they don't have to be spelled correctly. Translating this brain function into code has to be a bitch I'm sure.

Siri is far better at understanding. It’s a gifted natural language AI technology that knows the myriad of ways people express intent. Siri knows that by “book” you don’t mean a paperback novel but the action to “reserve” a table.

With clever programming it'll look at "book", "table", "Il Fornaio" find out what they are and see that is a restaurant. It'll understand that's a restaurant and you want reservations through OpenTable. Which seems to be an extremely tied in service for it to work as well as it does. This is table lookup but in an extremely fast and clever way. Another reason why I think that Siri is supported by off site servers and not the A5.

It's alot more complicated than that from what I've seen of it, and this presentation and function is amazing, but it is based in command words that can be easily recognized. Why I believe that this is restricted to the 4S is to drive sales. It was working on lesser hardware than the 4S in the form of an app and it works beautifully in the tech demo. Phil Schiller saying that it's supported by off site servers tells me that it is process intensive and the A5 isn't the only thing used to make it work. I'm not trying to down play the awesomenes that it is, but words in there can be figured out by their order and a clear instruction made from them. Wolfram Alpha does this too, and it's not in a phone. I think Siri is amazing, but there are basic fundamentals that make it work. Making it work system wide is where the A5 comes into play is what I guess. One core can chew on what was heard and the other works on getting to the information and presenting it to you.

I'm probably completely wrong though. Just my opinion of course. I sincerely hope it'll be included in iOS5 for the iPhone 4 because it looks really awesome.

It most certainly has been Apple's MO in the past:
- iPhone 3G had MMS, original iPhone did not
- iPhone 3GS had video recording built in, iPhone 3G did not
- iPhone 4 had FaceTime, iPhone 3GS did not
- iPhone 4s will now have Siri integration, iPhone 4 will not

All but the FaceTime change were software features that Apple chose to limit to the latest and greatest model as a selling feature.

The lack of FaceTime on 3GS is what almost made me buy a iPhone 4 this summer, after my contract was up, because I could really have used it during some cross-country trips.

Glad I waited for the 4S now, though...

What's even worse, the FaceTime camera was the only real hardware change in that list besides the i4 to i4S. The original iPhone and the 3G had the exact same hardware except for a 3G radio. The 3GS was a small CPU bump and the camera wasn't that much better performance-wise. It had autofocus and autoexposure but the photos weren't that much better and the video taken with Cycorder on the original iPhone was just as good as what the 3GS would capture.

I had Cycorder on my OG iPhone and it took video that was as good quality as the 3GS video except for about 5-10FPS less framerate. Quality just as good though. Cycorder was written and distributed for free by a dude (Jay Freeman/Saurik) with a pretty awesome neck beard, not an Apple engineer. Jailbreakers had MMS AND video recording running on hardware that Apple said it wasn't possible on. FaceTime I can understand from Apples point of view because it was a big hardware improvement and change, you can't make hardware out of software after all, the others were lies to sell more hardware. Which I can also see from Apples point of view but it doesn't make it any less of a dick move on their part.

NP- but get ready for a lot of people now shouting to their phones- "Get Me...", "Give Me...", ""I Want!", "Where is?". I should get Advil stock.
It will be interesting to see how Cook and Apple try to convince me and the public that is something I want or even need.

My career completely relies on the calendar. I tossed my paper calendar in favor of MobileMe, which works flawlessly between the iPhone, iPad and iMac. Being able to enter appointments by voice command will streamline things very easily and will take back major chunks of time.

Of course, with all those appointments means that I have many, many contacts in Address Book on those devices as well, so being able to enter in new contacts, retrieve phone numbers and dial will also take back big chunks of time.

And those are the first two uses I can think of right off the bat.

I think you're doomsday prediction of people talking everywhere is a bit ridiculous, if not hilarious.

Interesting how the trolls never learn. The same arguments every time Apple release new iProduct and specially iPhone. Every year we hear "didn't live to the hype", "greedy Apple limiting x feature to new iPhone", "only fanboys will upgrade".. etc.

I have news for you. Saying these things will not make them come true. Maybe in your mind they are true but reality is something else.

Wow! You're outdoing all of your previous posts! ...and I thought your posts about women making phones while nude was bad!

Tell me, do you want your phone to talk dirty to you in that '19 year old red head' voice? I'm guessing you don't do well with girls. You're as bad as my little brother that has Lara Croft walking around naked on his computer! If you're the same age then some of your previous posts make more sense.

I shouldn't have to tell this to anybody, but you seem like a reasonable person and I'll let you in on a little secret. I operate on a higher level than most posters and what I write may often very well be dripping with sarcasm, irony and wit. There are those who get what I write and then there are those who don't. I don't really have much more to say about that subject.

My career completely relies on the calendar. I tossed my paper calendar in favor of MobileMe, which works flawlessly between the iPhone, iPad and iMac. Being able to enter appointments by voice command will streamline things very easily and will take back major chunks of time.

Of course, with all those appointments means that I have many, many contacts in Address Book on those devices as well, so being able to enter in new contacts, retrieve phone numbers and dial will also take back big chunks of time.

And those are the first two uses I can think of right off the bat.

I think you're doomsday prediction of people talking everywhere is a bit ridiculous, if not hilarious.

Looks like this is Apple's response to google voice actions. Should be interesting to see how they improve upon it and how google responds to this.

the biggest issue with voice actions was its network dependence; everything was done on google's end, so no data/reception meant it didn't work at all. I wonder how much of Siri is done locally.

the TTS voice sounds pretty decent too. Although I don't think I would want my messages read aloud to me; especially in public. I'm not a fan of trying to make the phone respond like a human tho; it kind of amplifies the awkwardness of it. (eg. I would much prefer it to just say "processing" or "loading" instead of "let me think...")

Siri is vastly more sophisticated than Google Voice Actions. Google's system is a limited set of verbs (send, listen, go to, call, etc.) coupled with a limited set of nouns (email, music, web site, contact, etc.) in that order, plus speech to text for text content and search strings.

Siri is an AI system that parses natural English to determine context and intent, so I'm not limited to a library of terms or a certain construction (verb noun). I can say "What's the quickest way get to Jim's house from here" or "Remind me to buy milk when I go to the store" or "Move my appointment with Susan a half hour forward." Any of those would leave Voice Actions scratching its head.

They spoke of the sayings and doings of their commander, the grand duke, and told stories of his kindness and irascibility.

Siri is vastly more sophisticated than Google Voice Actions. Google's system is a limited set of verbs (send, listen, go to, call, etc.) coupled with a limited set of nouns (email, music, web site, contact, etc.) in that order, plus speech to text for text content and search strings.

Siri is an AI system that parses natural English to determine context and intent, so I'm not limited to a library of terms or a certain construction (verb noun). I can say "What's the quickest way get to Jim's house from here" or "Remind me to buy milk when I go to the store" or "Move my appointment with Susan a half hour forward." Any of those would leave Voice Actions scratching its head.

good to know there are people here who get it.. thank you thank you.
why it is so hard for some to get their head around this?
Seems like some are still struggle at the fundamental difference between translation - speech to text (audio to transcribed text dication) and what happens to the text after it is captured for analysis. Its what happens to this text after it is translated to text that makes Siri special. Its AI engine, not a simple traditional rule based mapping engine that looks for a predetermined sentence structure. I even question that Siri has developed any STT engine at all. Why reinvent the wheel? if I was Siri I would just license a STT engine. STT is not their core business.

"Building for the future?! They should be running around reacting to the present!" -John Moltz

If that's the case, I hope that teaches the apologists who were saying the iPad's RAM stinginess was no big deal. It might not make a big difference at the time, but it often leads to quick obsolescence.

This is the biggest problem I have with Apples IOS devices, RAM limitation have been a problem with every release.

DED Spin. After a lack luster Tim Cook presentation and a warmed up iPhone, DED is hoping this will be the kicker that gets people ligned up for this new phone.

I DOUBT it, just because I cant see people jabbering away in fron of other people. I see this being banned in many locations, especially if texting was already banned in a location.

I bet the iPhone 4S has the WORST sales of any iPhone so far. Everyone will hold out for the iPhone 5. 3G owners will pickup a $99 iPhone 4.

I'll take that bet! iPhone 4S will be the largest selling mobile device of all time... beating iP4 by noo less that 30%. That means ~ 27 Million/Quarter... possibly 30 mil.

No I'm not joking or high. What amazes me is how shortsighted people are. With the power of the new iP4S, Camera, Siri, iOS5, iCloud... there is just no other phone or system out there that can beat it... other than possibly iP4 or 3GS... save some functionality and speed... but other than that, the absolute best ecosystem money can buy and be a part of (period).

Knowing what you are talking about would help you understand why you are so wrong. By "Realistic" - AI Forum Member

Is it outdoors as in a city? On a windy day?
With an ambulance passing? Or a fire engine?

I think the counter argument would be that it would work in any situation where talking on the phone is a viable option. An ambulance driving by will usually interrupt a phone conversation, as will a loud car or bike, to which my response is to say to the person on the other end, "just a sec....okay, what were you saying?" Minor inconvenience. Windy days are the same...sometimes it's just not worth it to attempt a conversation when the wind is blowing hard. On the other hand...I've usually been able to complete those conversations once I get into a car. Point being: I think it will be "limited" by the same issues plaguing talking on the phone in general. When it's windy, I usually stall my conversations until I'm in a car or otherwise indoors. Passing cars...well, I'll just wait a few moments, as I would on a phone call. In a loud bar or restaurant...we'll see, but I'm not usually scheduling calender events or asking for directions in those situations. As with most technology, there are going to be one to five percent of situations where it just isn't feasible to use it, though I don't see these drawbacks as a failure of the technology itself. On the rare occasion it's too loud...well, I have trouble talking to my friend who is right next to me...failure of vocal chords and ears? I like your point, though I think your point is a great example of how extreme conditions will have to be for this NOT to work. Really interested to see where this technology will be in five years. Am pretty excited about it now, though, as most imagined instances of use (for me) would be under ideal conditions.